By Guest blogger/author Naomi Hirahara

Artificial intelligence, especially ChatGPT, is on people’s minds these days. ChatGPT is developed through OpenAI, a company Elon Musk co-founded with a controlling and growing investment by Microsoft, which is beta-testing artificial intelligence in its search engine, bing. Instead of doing a simple Google search in which you type in a word, phrase, or even question, resulting in a list of search links, chat bots can provide full narratives. They are interactive, too, and can simulate a conversation with the user, albeit with mixed results. (See https://www.kpcc.org/2023-02-27/how-microsofts-experiment-in-artificial-intelligence-tech-backfired)

These developments have Google on the run and the whole high-tech community both excited and nervous about what disruptions may take place. Certain authors savvy about this world have also expressed the whole range of emotions—fear, anticipation, and indifference. Artificial intelligence is already used in narrating audiobooks for outlets like Apple Books in lieu of “real people.”…